Skinamarink and the Importance of Narratives
Our long national nightmare is not over...at least not yet.
I was reading about a horror flick yesterday, mostly intrigued about its originality.
It is called Skinamarink and basically it is a representation of a child's nightmare - two children wake up in the middle of the night to find their father is missing, and all the windows and doors in their home have vanished. On top of that familiar things start to disappear.
It’s not a slasher/blood and guts/saw blades/dude in a hockey mask with a chainsaw kind of thing, the fear is generated in a far more subtle manner. Rather than shock, the movie relies on anxiety, apprehension, confusion and a wisp of familiarity crushed by unfamiliar changes.
But for all the randomness, there is a plot – it is that it has no plot. It has nothing for the viewer to latch onto. It is just free-flowing and random fear, structured just like a random nightmare. It is a movie not intended to entertain, only to generate fear.
People who have screened it say it is way too disturbing for kids - and even some adults - because it portrays kids in mortal danger and there is such a sense of chaos, it induces such a deep fear that people who saw it reported having nightmares for weeks after seeing it. People even reported being so uncomfortable during the movie, they had to leave the theater just to get a break and regain a sense of reality.
Movie plots are essentially a long narrative, a story or an account of events or experiences.
As I considered why the lack of a narrative in this move is such a disruptor, it dawned on me that is a prime illustration of why narratives are important.
Narratives can be either true or false, but they are always important.
Why?
Because they make dealing with the unknown (or the unknowable) more comfortable. They at least provide the illusion of control.
Our current national situation is like Skinamarink in that there is no narrative, more accurately, there are sub-narratives, but there is no metanarrative that ties everything together.
Nothing the Democrats do makes sense because it is not logical to think the proposed actions could ever yield the promised conclusions. In most minds, that means the people proposing such things are incompetent - or there are goals and objectives hidden from the people.
As the word implies, metanarratives are narratives about narratives, giving a grand structural story to something more complex, like a plan for governance of a nation.
It would seem that analogizing what we are experiencing today to an unstructured horror film is apt, because just as the goal of the absence of a narrative in the movie is to generate fear, the absence of a national metanarrative in America is intended to yield the same results. America does share much with the image of a once familiar environment made unfamiliar by eliminating the windows and doors.
Philosophies based on progressive relativism, deconstructionism – the destruction of the language to strip traditional meaning from words, and the inherent contradictions of postmodernism, are all mechanisms used to destroy the metanarrative that has held America, and to a larger extent, all of Western civilization, together for centuries.
Like a rudderless ship driven by unseen currents toward the shoals, the erasure of America’s metanarrative of being the good superpower, a nation based on liberty and justice for all, and a place where the individual can make of himself whatever he is capable has been under assault for decades, but accelerated with the election of a man with a tissue paper thin resume, but a lifetime of Marxist training. To top that off, he was elected primarily due to his race and the overwhelming need of people on the left to shed their white guilt. It was the political equivalent of reacting to being called a racist by saying “Well, I have a black friend.”
President Trump gave the nation an opportunity to turn it around, but the power brokers decided they liked the chaos and hatred.
From that, the unwanted, unneeded, unelected Biden Supremacy was born.
If now feels like a nightmare to you, you aren’t wrong.
In August of 1974, Richard Nixon ended his administration by resigning. Gerald Ford followed Nixon's farewell address by saying:
“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”
What he didn’t know is that our long national nightmare was just beginning.
The only good thing about nightmares is that we eventually wake up.
America is yawning, and I smell the coffee brewing.
OH. THIS IS SO GOOD.
It may just be the “meta narrative” of this nightmare that we needed; putting a name to a senseless, undefinable state of being.
While reading, memories of certain past experiences were called to the surface… events I’ve long pondered the unexpected impact of based largely on whether, at the time, I had a NAME for them.
Some generated that free-floating anxiety you spoke of, Because I couldn’t define, understand, plan for them, then categorize and send them to mental archives.
Others were traumatic enough to leave me numb, anesthetized emotionally (like the physical shock after traumatic injury that protects one from realization of the severity)…. Until years later when I Had a word for it. By then, the normal trauma it would have generated had dissipated so much, I was protected from the full impact of it.
But that nightmare DID end.
If one considers even a few of the inevitable societal and economic consequences of these changes, this one has all the signs of hurtling, at breakneck speed, into the abyss. I think we’re in that state of shock, unable to fathom the peril, because we cannot define this.
And they’re all in the roller-coaster car, whooping and screeching with joy, because… ?? They’re too clueless to see the consequences?? Or because they know something we don’t know??